Take a look at the contract you have signed with your ISP. Some of the providers block IRC prots due to some retarded script kiddies who like to mess with irc servers writing DOS Bots.

Pick any other port within the IRC range (6665-6669 AFAIR) and try again. If you want to do this in the java applet use "/server <server>:<port>" in the command window to connect to any irc server of your choice.

about that nmap – funny, yes. no idea where this comes from, perhaps nmap queries some default services and tries to resolve the server output. If you are snoopy enough you might want to tcpdump the connection to get an clue wtf dig was complainign about. The DNS Records I checked (A, CNAME, TXT, SOA ..) did not contain anything suspicious what might not have been resolved correctly.

The telnet isn’t working, but it does respond to a ping….
H:>telnet irc.thinstack.net 6667
Connecting To irc.thinstack.net…Could not open connection to the host, on port
6667: Connect failed
Pinging irc.thinstack.net [72.20.17.158] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 72.20.17.158: bytes=32 time=69ms TTL=49

I’ve never seen the illegal characters in hostname on an nmap before… I would think that I’m being stopped by an acl on the firewall… But I take care of said firewall, and a host to any can be a powerful thing…. I’ll check the logs

This missive brought to you by SynapticJam – hhhmmm… tastes like chicken

Ic, so this is java applet related? I presume you are talking then about the page with the embedded irc applet. Can’t tell you why the applet does now connect to the server. The exception indicates connection problems.

Here are couple of things you might want to check:

– Java Plugin Settings, take a look at the network / proxy settings. you might either have to use one or some bogus settings are configured over tehre.

– IRC Ports might be blocked, try to telnet into any irc server on the default port which would be 6667. For me the connect attempt to the irc server used here looks like this:

– If the telnet connect attempt succeeded, it must be related to the java security policies installed on your computer. This is rather a complicated issue, might even behave differently if you switch browsers. Easiest way around this would be not to use the java plugin / java version of the chat but pick a standalone irc client instead. I used HydraIRC back then – http://www.hydrairc.com/